blog.bioethics.net

Stem Cells from Cloning: Better, Faster, and from 6 Year-olds and Incredibly Charitable Young Women

This week's Science, just out, discusses work just completed by Woo Suk Hwang, Shin Yong Moon and colleagues at Seoul National University. They did several interesting things. This team, a year ago, published in the same journal their successful cloning of a human embryo.

In this publication they indicate that they have been able to produce cloned human embryos much more efficiently, which means fewer oocytes (eggs) are required to produce an embryo healthy enough that its cells can be harvested to produce "lines" of stem cells. They were able to do so because they used younger egg donors, which they discovered result in more healthy embryos than older donors. And they were able to grow embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo manually. Instead they put the developing embryo (is it really an embryo? film at 11) atop a bed of mouse feeder cells, and for some reason the embryo just dissolved (naturally?) into a mass of stem cells.

This research is likely to reframe the stem cell debate entirely. First, it suggests that it will be possible to really do research soon on the production of "personalized" lines of stem cells, derived from the sick person and for the purpose of implantation into the same person. In fact, the researchers produced an embryo from the skin cell of a young boy (6) with a degenerative disease that couldn't be treated with a direct infusion of stem cells - but that might be treated by genetically altering the first cell of that cloned embryo, resulting in healthy cells that are still genetically very similar to the child who would receive them.

Now, clearly, it wasn't such a wise idea for these folks to start with a six year-old - you can't get consent to do therapeutic cloning on a six year-old - but the experiment is telling.

A big issue here is that NAS guidelines on stem cell research (scroll down to Jon Moreno's picture) suggest that it is a mistake to pay egg donors for their donation for stem cell research. The effect of that here would be huge - young women who will donate their eggs without compensation given the risks associate with egg donation. Frankly, there just won't be egg donation without payment.